Smalland: Survive the Wilds is one of those games where I really like the concept, but the actual execution never gave me a reason to care about continuing. The idea of playing as a tiny creature in a huge world immediately reminded me of Arthur and the Invisibles, and the game is genuinely beautiful, with the scale of the world making the concept work visually. The problem is that once I started playing, I found very little underneath that presentation that kept me interested.
The biggest issue for me is how poorly the game handles exploration and progression. The map is quite large, but there is no proper fast travel system, so moving between distant areas means spending a lot of time walking. The Great Trees could have been a perfect solution to this. After climbing and capturing a tree, the game could have allowed us to use balloons to travel between captured trees, while still making the initial climb an important part of exploration. Instead, moving your Tree Base to another tree removes the previous one as a useful location, meaning you still have to walk back across the map whenever you need to return somewhere. This becomes especially annoying when you die while trying to reach a new area, because you have to make the entire journey again. I do not mind walking in survival games, but the walking needs to have a purpose. Here, the size of the map often feels more like a way of making the player spend more time travelling than a reason to explore it.
The progression has the same problem. I would not say that Smalland is simply too slow, because slow progression can work perfectly well in survival games. The problem is that the progression is badly structured and barely explains itself. I can walk around for a long time finding the same stone, flint and branches, while needing other materials for better equipment without being told where those materials can actually be found. At one point I needed screws and had no idea where to get them, so I had to look outside the game to find the answer. The game could easily tell the player where a material is normally found, or establish clear regions where better resources start appearing, but instead it leaves too much to trial and error. Even enemies are poorly communicated, because I can enter an area and encounter creatures several levels above me without a clear indication that I am entering a dangerous region. A simple skull or danger indicator would have made the progression of the world much easier to understand: the further I move from the starting area, the stronger the enemies should become, the better the resources should be, and the more advanced the equipment I should need. That kind of geographical progression works extremely well in survival games, but Smalland never establishes it clearly enough.
The crafting system suffers from exactly the same problem. The issue is not that there are crafting tiers or recipes locked behind progression; that is normal for the genre. The problem is that the game does not properly teach the player how to reach those tiers. I can unlock something and then discover that I need a material I have never seen, without the game giving me a useful explanation of where to obtain it. The same happens with taming. Before I can properly tame a creature, I need to know what it eats, but the game does not make this information clear enough for a first-time player. The incubator is another example, because the game does not properly explain that incubating creatures can lead to attacks on the base from other creatures of the same type. At the point where I reached this system, I also had very little in the way of a proper defensive setup, so it felt like the game was introducing consequences without adequately explaining the system that caused them.
The NPC progression adds another layer to this loop. Some of the NPCs I encountered use reputation systems, where increasing reputation unlocks new items and progression, but even here the game does not properly explain how that reputation is supposed to be earned. I have the game tips enabled, yet I still found myself having to figure out these systems independently. There are quests, but the game does not establish a clear main story path that naturally guides the player through the world. Instead, I often have to open the quest menu and work out which objective actually matters, while the objectives themselves feel more like steps towards unlocking another item than part of a meaningful journey.
That leads directly into the biggest disappointment for me: the story. This is not a criticism about the lack of voice acting, because a game does not need voice acting to tell a good story. The problem is that Smalland barely gives me a story worth caring about. The premise has so much potential. You could have different clans of tiny creatures fighting over territory, a war caused by humans destroying their world, a kingdom falling apart, or some larger conflict that gives the player an actual reason to explore this enormous environment.
Instead, the narrative feels extremely basic, and the survival systems exist without a meaningful story giving them context. I like games with strong stories, and Smalland never managed to make me care about what was happening to this world or why I should continue exploring it.
This is where I think the comparison with other survival games becomes important. Cubic Odyssey has plenty of things I criticised, but it does a much better job of giving the player clear objectives and showing what they are working towards. Grounded has a much stronger narrative structure and a clearer sense of progression. Enshrouded gives me a much more interesting building system and exploration tools. Valheim does not have perfect fast travel either, but its portal system at least gives the player a way to solve long-distance travel through preparation and construction. Smalland instead leaves me walking around a huge map while repeatedly farming materials that the game barely explains how to obtain.
After around six hours, the problem is simply that I did not enjoy the gameplay enough to want to continue. The exploration did not interest me, the building did not interest me enough to keep me there, the taming system did not pull me in, the crafting progression felt unnecessarily obscure, and the story gave me almost nothing to care about. The concept is genuinely good, and I can understand why someone could get a lot more out of this game than I did, but for me the foundations are too basic and too poorly explained. Smalland feels like it has the idea for a much better game buried inside it, but the systems surrounding that idea never became interesting enough for me to want to spend more of my time there.
[b]Score: 4/10[/b]
(1) Trash(2) Horrible(3) Very Bad(4) Bad(5) Average
(6) Fine(7) Good(8) Very Good(9) Great(10) Masterpiece
